Keep The Midnight Out (William Lorimer) (26 page)

E
wan Angus twisted the orange twine nervously between his long fingers as he stood outside the back door of Calum Mhor’s house. Mrs Calum would be glad enough of the pair of sea trout dangling from his fist, he knew, but the big sergeant’s reaction to what he was about to tell him was another story.

‘Come away in, Ewan.’ Mrs Calum stood in the doorway, beaming. ‘You know where the kitchen is, lad,’ she said, taking the fish from the tall young fisherman’s hands and then stepping aside to let him enter the house. ‘A cup of tea? Kettle’s on.’

‘No thanks, missus.’ Ewan Angus bobbed his head then took off the flat tweed cap he was wearing. ‘Actually,’ he cleared his throat nervously, ‘I was wondering if Himself was at home?’

‘Calum?’ The woman’s eyebrows rose in surprise. ‘Aye, he is, right enough.’ She stared at the young man for a moment then waddled off to the foot of the stairs.

‘Calum!’ Her voice boomed as she called out her husband’s name. ‘A fellow here to see you!’

There was the sound of a door closing upstairs and heavy footsteps descending then the big policeman came into view.

‘It’s yourself, Ewan Angus, what can I do for you, lad?’

‘I…’ He glanced furtively at Mrs McManus standing watching.

‘It’s a wee bit private, sir…’ he said, biting his lip and nodding apologetically at the police sergeant’s wife.

Calum Mhor raised his chin. ‘Aye, well. Come away ben the house. We can have a wee talk through in the lounge,’ he said, ushering the younger man along the hallway. ‘The visitors are all away out just now.’

Ewan Angus followed the policeman into a spacious room that was light and airy; to the fisherman’s eyes everything seemed very clean and bright. Glass-topped tables and a sideboard full of ornaments and silver-framed photos gleamed, a testament no doubt to Mrs Calum’s work with polish and duster. He looked past the flowered curtains drawn back against picture windows that faced the pier where the
Isle of Mull
was disgorging its final stream of cars for the day from below its raised bow.

‘Sit down, lad,’ Calum said.

‘Thanks.’ Ewan Angus perched on the edge of a cream-coloured sofa as though afraid that he might somehow leave a mark on the pristine furnishings.

‘There’s something on your mind,’ Calum observed, giving the fisherman a shrewd look.

‘Aye,’ Ewan Angus sighed volubly. ‘We should have come to you at the time,’ he began, looking down at the cap and screwing it between his fingers. ‘Only…’

‘Aye?’

‘Da was worried we’d lose the boat,’ Ewan Angus blurted out.

‘Ah, you were at the splash.’ Calum nodded. ‘Well. That’s something between thee and me, eh, laddie?’ The big man winked and grinned.

‘Well, it’s no’ as easy as that, sir,’ the young man replied. ‘You see… I’m here to explain about that poor boy, the one that Mr Lorimer found at Leiter.’

Calum Mhor watched the fisherman walk, head bowed, back along the road towards the car park where he had left his father’s van. It had taken a bit of courage to come and confess their small part in the discovery of Rory Dalgleish’s body. But had old Ewan Angus known that his son was making this visit to the police sergeant’s home in Craignure? Perhaps the lad was at this moment wondering how to explain his actions to his fisherman father.

Lorimer had been right after all, he thought, walking away from the window as he mentally admired the perspicacity of the Glasgow detective. The tide had been unnaturally high but even so, that had not explained why the body had been found on dry ground. But now that part of the puzzle was solved. The discovery of Rory’s dead body by the two fishermen and the old man’s fear that they would risk confiscation of their boat and nets accounted for that inconsistency. He was prepared to make an official statement, Ewan Angus had agreed, his head hung in sudden shame. He’d make sure of that. And, once the old man had been told that it was a fait accompli, he’d surely agree to do the same, despite the consequences.

What DI Crozier would do to the fishermen was anyone’s guess, Calum sighed to himself. He would do his best to mitigate the penalty placed upon them but keeping such information was bound to have repercussions of some kind. They’d be lucky to keep their boat but perhaps Crozier could be persuaded to see reason? He hoped so. Things had been hard for old Ewan Angus after his partner, Dougie Ingram, had died. Bella had refused to allow the older man permission to use the boat after her husband’s death and they’d had to make do with illicit forays into other folks’ waters. It was something that the big police sergeant and others had overlooked, the feeling that Bella Ingram had wronged her husband’s partner outweighing any legal consideration.

His thoughts turned to what sorts of losses were inevitable. There was the net, for one thing. The fishing net that had caught the boy’s dead body would have to be examined as soon as Ewan Angus could bring it to the incident room in Tobermory. Calum Mhor sighed. Perhaps he would talk to the tall detective from Glasgow, see if he could persuade Crozier to go lightly on the father and son.

‘Courlene,’ the voice on the telephone told her.

‘What’s that exactly?’ Rosie enquired.

‘It’s all in my report, I’ve just sent it to you as an attachment,’ the forensic officer explained. ‘It’s a sort of twine used in the fishing industry. You can read up the whole things once you open my email.’

‘Courlene,’ Rosie whispered to herself, fingers busy at her keyboard. She sat back and read the report from the man who had just called her. The severe pressure marks on Rory Dalgleish’s body had been made with a sort of polythene twine, the scientist claimed. It was one of the most successful of Courtauld’s commercial twines developed for the fishing industry, mainly distributed by a company called Boris Nets and now used by fishing fleets all over the world.

Great
, Rosie thought.
Doesn’t exactly narrow it down, then
. However the report went on to explain that the marks imprinted on the victim’s wrists and ankles were not made by the fishermen’s nets, which would have left a criss-cross pattern, but by lengths of the twine instead.

She scrolled down, looking at the various types of twine, her cursor coming to rest on the orange strands marked out by her friend in the forensic lab. It was a type of twine that had once been sold by chandlers but had been discontinued more than twenty years ago. That was not to say, the report went on, that some of this brand of Courlene was not still in existence, rolled up in corners of fishing boat lockers all over the globe. She read on, taking note of the scientific properties of the twine and glancing from time to time at the photographs by the side of her laptop, seeing the marks around the boy’s limbs that even such long immersion in water had failed to remove.

Rosie stared past the screen for a long moment, wondering. Solly had told her all about the cold case from 1995. Had Lorimer been correct to imagine there was a connection between these two murders? Her glance fell onto the screen once again. And, she thought, a faint smile hovering over her lips, could this be the very thing to link them both together?

Detective Superintendent Lorimer handed back the book to the clerk behind the desk. It was important to sign and date any entry whenever a production was to be re-examined. Any failure to do so could jeopardise a future court case. He waited patiently while the woman went in search of the bag.

‘Just a few samples,’ she told him. ‘Was that all the deceased had on him?’

‘He was found naked in the water,’ Lorimer explained. ‘There were only ever the forensic samples taken at the post-mortem.’

‘Sad,’ she remarked, shaking her head. ‘There’s a story there somewhere, no doubt.’

Lorimer took the production bag from her hands and slipped it into the case file he was already carrying. Things had changed a lot in twenty years, he mused, but at least the evidence from old cases was still being preserved, even if it only amounted to the filth taken by a pathologist from under a victim’s fingernails or the water weeds that had been clinging to his body. The cadaver itself had long since been buried in an unmarked grave but there were plenty of photographic records from the post-mortem still in the file. He heaved a sigh, remembering that morning by the Clyde and the young student who had risen to become Head of Forensic Medical Science at the University of Glasgow. How young they had both been back then! And how things had progressed in both their professions. Nowadays Rosie could email him with the results of toxicology and other tests so that a case could be pushed along far more swiftly than in the old days when they were both just starting out.

He pushed open the door to his office and laid the file on his desk, a surge of anticipation making him shiver suddenly. What if…? He sat down and leaned forward, his hand resting for a moment on the front cover of the file, the date on its label filling his mind with so many memories.

When he opened the folder it was like turning back time itself. The photographs of the boy’s dead body lying on the grass, the notes that he remembered writing as a young detective constable and the rubber stamps from the Crown Office.

He turned the pages of the file, setting the photographs carefully to one side.

The drawing slipped out from between the pages of the file, so that Lorimer almost let it fall from his fingers. It was still in its plastic bag, taped down behind to keep it clean, he supposed, turning it over.

The pencil-drawn image of a young man stared out at him. Where had it come from? Lorimer wondered, brow furrowing. Then he remembered. Hadn’t he asked at the art school if an image could be created from the original photographs? Someone had done this, not an enhanced digital photo, but a carefully executed sketch. He stared at the pencil drawing of the boy as he might have looked before the murder. It had been the same day that Maggie had lost the baby. He’d gone on leave afterwards and the case had been put aside by the time he had returned. But someone had carried out his request and the drawing had been put into the case file along with all the rest of the notes. But he had never seen it, and, numbed with grief for the loss of their baby son, Lorimer had never even remembered that he had asked for such a thing to be done.

He stared at the drawing. It was a black and white pencil drawing but even so, the detective could recall the young man’s flame-red hair. He sat back, a sense of loss pervading him. Someone’s son, he thought. Someone’s friend? And yet not a single person had come forward and this drawing had languished unseen for twenty years inside these case notes, never seeing the light of day or being copied into thousands of newspapers where it might have jolted somebody’s memory.

It could still be done, he mused.
Crimewatch
might be interested in a cold case from twenty years back.
Do you recognise this man?
he could almost hear the blonde presenter ask.

Courlene
, he reminded himself, picking up the file and sifting through the section where several photographs had been taken in situ at the post-mortem examination. That was what he had retrieved this file to see.

There were several close-up photographs of the marks around the boy’s ankles and wrists, good enough to see the pattern that the binding twine had made. Rosie’s friend in forensics would be able to judge now whether both young men had been bound up in the same type of synthetic twine, the identity of which had eluded the investigating team all those years ago.

Lorimer picked up his phone and tapped out the pathologist’s number.

It had begun over a cup of tea, a nice green pot set on a wooden stand, as he recalled. How such a simple object could be imbued with the bitterness that had followed!
 

The café in Kelvingrove had been quiet, few visitors about on that memorable weekday; the red-haired waiter had been chatty, smiling and catching his eye in a manner he recognised only too well as flirtation. It had been so easy after that, meeting along the pathway of the river, the excitement of a new clandestine relationship that was going to be just for fun, the lad had said, just for the moment. Except that he had given Rory other ideas.
 

There was pain, always pain, he’d told the boy as he’d pulled his bonds tighter, laughing as he’d heard his cries; that’s what made everything worth it.
 

He hadn’t expected the lad to follow up his suggestion of finding a post at Kilbeg, expecting the handwritten note with details scribbled down to be discarded after he had gone back home. And yet, Rory Dalgleish’s arrival on the pier at Craignure had filled his mind with images of what they might enjoy, images that were always accompanied by the sound of Rory begging him to stop the pain. Begging, but really wanting it too. Else why would he have come to work on the island?
 

The summer had been hot and sticky some days and the cool of the boat had given them some respite from their day-to-day work, different though it had been. There, as the waves had lapped against the hull, he and Rory had experimented with their lovemaking, passion driving them both to seek more adventurous ways of fulfilment.
 

And death had been the summit of his desire. Was this something he ought to have known? He felt that twitch in his fingers as though they were somehow apart from his body, entities that had a will of their own. Should he not feel exonerated from the guilt that tugged at his heart?
 

There had been moments when he had thought of confessing, wondering why another had taken the blame instead. But now Jock Maloney had changed his testimony and the investigation had begun all over again.
 

He could feel a shadow beginning to spread over his mind, blotting out the way his hands had grasped the boy’s neck, the old woman’s muffled cry as he had snuffed out her life. There was nothing more he wanted now than to sink back into its darkness.